Pope Francis has died
reuters.com
reuters.com
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Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
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(*Edited in response to community feedback.)
> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!
> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being
Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...
https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/02/does-the-pope-write-his-o...
> My suspicion is that Pope Francis may have more to do with crafting his own speeches than did previous pontiffs, because Pope Francis’ talks strike me as more spontaneous, conversational, and unfiltered.
Anyway, a public figure is still giving the direction and “plot points” to their speech writer.
why?
What you don't know is he would try things out on the golf course with his friend Buddy Hackett.
Even if Pope Francis gave the charge of writing his speeches to someone else, that would be an heavy responsability for that person.
The thing that I found interesting was during trump’s visit to the Vatican, he asked trump’s Slovenian wife if she was feeding him potica which indicated a surprising level of knowledge of the cuisine of a country which is largely insignificant on the world stage (as someone who’s half Slovene and has a loaf of potica on his kitchen counter, I think I can safely make that declaration).
Actually he was more fluent in the Piedmontese dialect. His Italian was somewhat wobbly at the time of his election.
I don’t have enough broad knowledge of Spanish (Castellano) to comment on its intelligibility across dialects (although Argentine/Uruguayan Spanish is more of a challenge to my Mexican-Spanish trained brain than European Spanish).
Part of it is the death and retirement of the last generation to be taught Latin from nursery to ordination.
But given the prominence and resources of the Vatican, they could find a few Latinists.
Definitely not surprising hearing a pope using it in a speech.
Not sure about Gen Z and younger people though.
Out of curiosity, Who hosts the holy servers?
Again I don't want to demean anyone's death.
The Dicastery for Communcation [0]. They're ASN 8978, and geolocation for all their IP addresses says that they're actually in the Vatican city state.
I am still enchanted by this name. Dicastery for Communication, sounds like some committee within Game of throne whom Viseris or Littlefinger (most likely Viseris) would have been the head of.
* As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a technical choice among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences. Human beings, however, not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding."
* In light of this, the use of AI, as Pope Francis said, must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
Yes, LLMs are more about knowledge than intelligence. AK rather than AI.
Wikipedia even has it's own page with some of the various definitions people use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_knowledge
Then we have implicit/explicit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_and_explicit_knowledg...) where some people assume one of them when they say "knowledge", others refer to the other.
In fact, there is an entire scientific field to understanding what "knowledge" actually is/means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
So yeah, it isn't as simple as looking it up in a dictionary, unfortunately.
Biology has a working definitions of "living organism" that includes a way to calculate likelihood that something is a living organism, but it still is probabilistic.
Understanding is another concept that depends on philosophy of the mind as opposed to concrete physical processes.
Though intelligence is possibly even less well defined than knowledge, so it's hard to tell.
I believe intelligence goes beyond that: knowing that such a system is a solution to an observed problem, architecting said system, using the output to solve a problem, analyzing the results, and deciding where to deploy additional systems.
I think both examples above can be done by AI (if not now, then soon)—but only after being prompted carefully by a human. However, a generalized AI that can do all of the above for any problem in the known universe is likely very far off.
to give an example, a quite boring "philosophy question" that's bandied around, usually by children, is "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". the answer is that "sound" is a word without a commonly-accepted, logically-derived meaning, for the reasons given above. so if to you the word sound is something human, then the answer is no, but if to you a sound is not something human, then the answer is yes. there's nothing particularly interesting or complex about the thought experiment, it's just a poorly defined word
To Chomsky? He'd have to speak for himself, but I suspect the answer is "yes, obviously, at least to be of interest to me."
Note that I'm not saying LLMs are useless or even that what they do is usefully described as "plagiarism."
But it seems entirely unsurprising to me that Chomsky would be unimpressed and uninterested -- even to the point of dismissiveness, he's pretty much like that -- precisely because they are unrelated to "cognition."
Yes...it does. "AI" aka modern flavor LLMs as we understand them today are just doing certain things thats humans can do but orders of magnitude faster. What exactly is impressive about it being able to succinctly sum up any topic under the Sun aside from the speed? It will never create a new genre of music. It will never create a new style of art from the ground up. It lacks the human spark of ingenuity. To even suggest that what it does anything close to human cognition is egregiously insulting.
the opinion you're parroting here completely misses the point of LLMs. their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is. their purpose is to accelerate information retrieval and translation and programming tasks, which they by and large are incredible at. even if they had the capacity to invent artistic movements, which in theory they most certainly do, starting an artistic movement is pretty much intrinsically a human thing, and it requires desire, inclination, trust and a grounding in the real world, such as it is. your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
whether it is "cognition" or not is completely irrelevant to their purpose and use, and its a complete waste of time trying to litigate if it is or not because the word in itself is poorly defined. if you're trying to figure out if j=k but you can't define j or k, and you do know that k isn't a big factor in the usefulness of the system, then what is the point? is it jealousy? fear? I assure you, LLMs are not a threat to the special ingenuity of your mind
this opinion is the equivalent of watching the invention of the pocket calculator and complaining that it can't write calculus equations on a black board
your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
There are plenty of people/communities online that want it to be exactly that and want to remove the pesky human element from the equation. Dismissing them because it doesn't fit your argument doesn't mean they don't exist.
To me this is the usual "it doesn't _really_ understand" claim which people say because they feel like their human exceptionality is threatened.
We ought to avoid anthropomorphizing LLMs. It is muddle headed.
An LLM doesn't deal with propositions, and it is propositions that are the subjects of truth claims. LLMs produce strings of characters that, when interpreted by a human reader, can look like propositions and result in propositions in the human mind, and it is those propositions that have intentionality and truth value. But what the LLMs produce are not the direct expression of propositional content, only the recombination of a large number of expressions of propositional content authored by many human authors.
People are projecting subjective convention onto the objective. The objective truth about LLMs is far poorer in substance than the conventional readings we give to what LLMs generate. There is a good deal of superstition and magical thinking that surrounds LLMs.
I question both the organ and the action.
Are we sure? No. But neither should you be. Question but be open to answers you may not expect.
If Francis held Thomistic views on the subject, then even the brain, while needed for human intelligence, does not suffice for its operation, as functions like abstraction require the intellect, which cannot be entirely physical in operation since form cannot exist in matter without also instantiating the form, something by definition opposed to abstraction.
others on this very thread are proposing this exact extension.
I'll ignore the supernatural suggestion.
I didn't say the heart plays a role in intelligence. I simply allowed for the possibility for the sake of argument. The central claim is that no one (here, Francis and his writers) who uses the word "heart" colloquially is making the claim that the heart-as-organ is the seat of intelligence or what have you.
You're committing a vulgar equivocation fallacy that the average person with common sense would recognize. I have a difficult time believing you don't understand something so obvious.
But as for the quote, it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others, to the point where AI will easily out-empathy them, both as a conversationalist and as a robotic assistant (such as a 24/7 robot nurse with no other patients).
Sorry but not everyone is an American.
And as Conway's law applies, of course AI done by American or Chinese companies will be oppressive - with only superficial politeness à la GladOS.
I’ll also add that many of his admirers as well as his detractors exaggerated his virtues, his merits, and his flaws. He was both the victim of a media and film industry all too eager to spin him into the “progressive pope” — never shying away from quoting him out of context to push an agenda — and the issuer of problematic and ambiguous documents and off-the-cuff remarks that only served to generate confusion.
Intellectually, Benedict XVI and John Paul II were in a different league. As far as the Jesuits are concerned, I know that in the popular imagination, the Jesuits are imagined to be some kind of “progressive”, intellectually superior order, but historically, they were sort of the shock troops of the Church. They certainly have merits to their name. While they did become involved in education, they drew from the traditions of education in the Church. Education and scholarship, however, are not their charism. Compare that with the Dominicans, for example, who have teaching and education as their mission (Thomas Aquinas is probably their most famous member).
I agree with the "ambiguous statements" though.
Isn't that what I said? I merely said it is not their charism, not their specialty. The point is that in the popular imagination, people elevate them above orders who not only have a better historical record, but whose mission is to educate, study, etc.
That isn't to downplay the good contributions of the Jesuits, but I can point you to Jesuits (who, as an order, are in poor shape these days, tbh) who would say the same thing. The popular imagination is simply ignorant or tendentious on this point in its exaggeration relative to the others.
There's a low bar if there ever was one
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/vati...
> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
Always struck me as a simple man and that likely contributed to people liking him more when compared to his predecessors. RIP.
He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to.
Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–with the plain white cassock–also emphasized his overall approach: less focus on grandeur, more on service.
His trick was hiding the conservative positions behind the mask of the beloved communicator.
I think maybe it's just some progressives (and related groups) who liked Francis a lot for many of his positions.
Perhaps he should have told Russia to have the "courage" to stop murdering people.
(well except ofcourse the corrupt dictator in ukraine, so it naturally falls on deaf ears)
* People naturally imitate what they see others do. A condemnation can prevent others from imitating the evil act.
* A condemnation calls on others to resist and not facilitate the evil act.
* Condemning someone makes you enemies, in a way that is plain for everyone to see. This positioning can open up for alliance offers from others with similar beliefs.
Making someone an enemy comes with risks and drawbacks of course. You become less able to influence someone if you cut ties, hence why people suggest to try influencing in private first.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230326034459/https://www.reute...
If an aggressor attacks your country, it takes courage to surrender. Churchill was a coward it seems. He could have surrendered to the Germans and saved so many lives on both sides.
/s
He put it well... Pope Francis was always a pastor at heart. And he put the needs of the person in front of him ahead of strict doctrine. The interviewee likened it to triage in a field hospital - address the soul in front of you, worry about doctrine later (suture the wound, worry about cholesterol later).
Meanwhile Francis was quite the opposite. Especially as seen in the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine. For much of Eastern Europe that was like 180 turn. At least here both church goers and not seem to despise Francis while JPII has a warm place in the hearts both factions. Maybe it was different far away where Russia ain’t a hot topic.
Feel free to google for more details. There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
Which would be bad, had he done so, but he didn't actually say that; the white flag comment was specifically and explicitly about being willing to directly negotiate with Russia, not about surrender.
> There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
He certainly called on multiple occasions for all parties to negotiate, but he was also consistent, both before Russia invaded, after the invasion and before the "white flag" comment, immediately after the "white flag" comment, and since that the invasion by Russia is (or "would be" before it occurred) unjustifiable, immoral, an act of aggression, and that Russia has the primary obligation to stop it.
It's hard to blame all the catholics that are sighing in relief hoping for a better successor.
Elevating Escrivá to sainthood and creating a personal prelature for Opus Dei handed them unmatched moral authority—authority they used to push back on women’s autonomy, justify discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and quietly influence politics from Spain to Latin America.
Popularity doesn’t erase the impact of empowering hard‑right movements that have harmed lives across the globe.
Also the + stuff.
The church has always influenced politics. See the fall of Communism as an example.
Pope JPII was for my southern European social democratic Catholic family much more polarizing than Pope Francis. Pope Francis had politics that are mainstream and not at all controversial in my part of the world. Whereas JPII was perceived as the guy who was buddies with Reagan and Bush and a general supporter of American foreign policy. To what extent that was a fair assessment, I do not want to comment, since he did try to speak against the invasion of Iraq.
None the less, it is not true that Pope Francis is more popular with non-Catholics (Reagan, Bush and most of the US were not Catholic and big supporters of JPII). It was also JPII that started the interfaith dialogue. It is also not true that Pope Francis is unpopular with Catholics.
There are Catholics all across the globe with vastly different opinions on all kinds of issues.
Notably, while Francis is sometimes considered liberal, there weren't (m)any notable changes to Church doctrine during his papacy.
He did have a habit (a good one, IMO) of speaking more off-the-cuff in interviews. Whether that was contrived, or just a natural part of his personality, I do not know. But, it was those comments that usually led to the "he's a liberal!" comments. And both sides of the political spectrum said similar things... "He's a liberal (like us)!" or "He's a liberal (unlike us)!" - so he was probably doing something right.
Even non-catholics like me could sympathize with the dismay of so many catholics at many of the positions/blunders of Francis.
It fictionalizes and sensationalizes some details; and that’s ok because its purpose is to make you feel exactly the way you feel about it.
Pope Francis was a wonderful steward of Christianity and espoused the virtues that anyone would want to see in their religious leaders: humility, grace, an openness to listen and a strong voice against even prelates in his own church that are xenophobic or nationalistic. He wanted us to welcome all and to live as the bible said Jesus did.
The fear I have is that each swing of the pendulum goes in two directions. He was far more “liberal” than the conservative Catholic prelates of the USCCB, and I fear his actions — including rightfully limiting the Latin mass, will force the church to swing in the other direction and give in to the illiberal forces that divide us.
- John 14:27
Why is that a political thing though? The mass of the roman church was for centuries (almost all it’s history?) in latin.
If you’re Catholic, suggesting that a mass spoken in one language over another is somehow "less" takes away from the most important idea of the Mass: reenacting Christ’s Last supper commandment and the institution of the Holy Eucharist for what amounts to word games.
This divisive description of the mass increased over the decades, to the point that it threatened to cause a schism. As such it was the Holy Father’s duty to resolve the issue.
There is no mention of how often, but given Jesus allergy to ritual as opposed to genuine acts of worship, it seems reasonable that this would not be a commonplace thing.
Again... interpretation.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/holy-eucharist-in-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_particular_churches_a...
Oversimplifying greatly, but in and from Western Europe we have the Latin Rite, and in/from the East we have the Byzantine (Greek) Rite. There are others, not of less importance, see the link above.
There’s quite a lot of history involved in all this. But in Western Christianity it was Latin that became predominant for public worship and knowledge transmission.
The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
I think it was very likely mostly Aramaic, possibly with some Hebrew mixed in (certain set prayers, with Torah readings in Hebrew followed by extemporaneous Aramaic translation). By the 1st century, Jews had abandoned Hebrew as an everyday tongue, a situation which didn't change until Zionists revived it in the late 19th century (which caused great controversy, since the traditional Jewish belief was that Hebrew is a holy language which should be reserved for religious purposes only, a position still maintained by most non-Israeli ultra-Orthodox to this day.)
Putting aside any claims of supernatural linguistic abilities, Jesus of Nazareth would likely have been fluent in Aramaic (his native tongue), competent in using Hebrew for certain religious purposes (but not as a language of everyday life), possibly some limited ability in Greek (but probably not fluent), maybe a few words of Latin (but very unlikely to be fluent).
> The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
The majority of TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) adherents care more about keeping the traditional Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) liturgy than about Latin in itself – Catholic priests are allowed to say the contemporary Mass in Latin (subject to certain conditions), but there is rather little demand for it.
God certainly had a special plan for these languages: the language of God's Law, the language of human power, and the language of human wisdom. The presence of His name in all three languages left the situation unambiguous to whoever might have been in the area to read it. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, hung on that cross. When pressed about it, Pilate would not amend those words.
In this way, though maybe unnecessary thanks to the Gift of Tongues the Holy Spirit later gave to His apostles, the sign stood as a kind of Rosetta Stone, which no one could misunderstand. It shows that history itself, along with all human matters, belong completely to Him, and at the same time it made those languages new by virtue of that single title, grounding them firmly in the Truth Himself.
Latin and Greek, themselves originally vernaculars, continue to hold a special place in their respective churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, continues to be used in many Eastern churches as well, again Catholic and Orthodox both. All three constitute especially venerable traditions—and to this we may add Coptic, since Jesus spent his early years in Egypt; Slavonic, for its very writing system's role in the conversion of the Slavs; and a handful of others I am more or less ignorant of. With each one, by entering into the language, you enter the mind of those first converts, who themselves entered the Mind of Christ.
In the Latin Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, or however you want to name it) we call the Latin language a "sacramental"—the same sort of thing as holy water, something which conveys grace to those who use it with an openness to those graces.
Demons hate it because of its legal precision, by which, in the name of the same Christ named in Latin on the cross, they are driven out of people, things, and places, fulfilling Christ's own prediction that His followers would cast out demons.
By forming one's faith life around one of these languages, one can more clearly ask those basic human questions that Christ is the answer to, without having to deal with the centuries of semantic drift and overloading that are scattered about the minefields of our modern vernaculars. The vernacular, of course, is no impediment to personal prayer, but as more and more people are gathered in one place the confusion of Babel threatens to set in.
On the other hand, every little Latin grammatical lesson, every new piece of vocabulary learned, reveals new wonders and opens the door to the great body of literature that was composed in the single Mind of Christ.
But we had this, and in the 20th century we let it slip through our fingers, not knowing what we'd been given. The problem is not that we don't know Latin. The problem is that, in broad cultural strokes, even when we did, we didn't care.
It didn't actually.
See Sacrosanctum Concilium: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_coun...
Vatican II opened the way for use of vernacular in the Mass while also directing "use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites".
In practice, after the overhaul of the Latin rites was completed and promulgated (published) in 1969, four years after the council ended in '65, the Latin language itself was dropped almost everywhere all at once and only translations were used. Many people rejoiced at that, some did not, but the vast majority of bishops, priests and laity alike, conservatives and liberals across the full spectrum, probably 99.999%, went ahead full throttle with Mass and all the sacraments in the vernacular.
There were hold-out contingents like the SSPX, led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who stuck with the all Latin rites per the last round of small reforms in 1962, the same as used for the celebration of Mass, etc. during the whole time of the council from 1962-65.
It was over the next 40 years that discontent with the reforms of 1969, and their fallout, began to grow. There was increasing awareness that it wasn't just a switch from Latin to vernacular — the '69 reforms were "cut from whole cloth", outright replacing the traditional rites with syntheses of a commission of scholars. Long story short, many Catholics, some born before '69 and many born after (myself included), desire a return, and have implemented a return, to the traditional form of the Latin rites. Pope Benedict XVI gave it his blessing. But then Pope Francis was not a fan, believing it to be a retrograde movement that causes more harm than good and a kind of "saying no" to the Holy Spirit. It's hard to find middle ground on this matter, to be quite honest.
Disclaimer: I'm definitely not old enough to predate vatican 2, so I'm not from a time when Latin Mass was widespread.
(I like Latin! Took it in high school, reading Lingua Latina for fun; I think the TLM is neat. But problematic.)
Well, opinions and all that…
My experience, and that of many of my fellow TLM goers that I’ve heard or read, is that we treasure solemn reverent worship that helps us focus on the Eucharistic sacrifice. If we were being distracted from “what the mass is about”, we’d take ourselves and our children elsewhere.
Here’s a video of yesterday’s Easter Sunday Mass offered by priests of the same religious order that operates the oratory where I attend Mass:
https://www.youtube.com/live/XshPZzdI0zk
If you get an opportunity, maybe attend Mass one Sunday at a location of the ICKSP or the FSSP. I believe you’ll experience a welcoming community of Catholics passionate about Jesus.
I'd actually love to attend a TLM! But I'm not setting foot into a chapel run by an order whose officiants accused the Jews of orchestrating 9/11. (That's SSPX, of course, not FSSP.)
I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
TLM, don't TLM, but conservative Catholics had a beef with Francis about the Latin Mass, and this is important context to that beef.
All around the world, there exists (or survives, sometimes only in parts) beautiful art and architecture and music that, with a little examination, is directly connected to the Latin Rite as it was celebrated for centuries. You can't really get the full picture of why those things are the way they are without knowledge of the classical Latin Rite. Likewise, a study of the Latin Rite on paper would be impoverished without knowledge of the historical cultural developments and artistic treasures that enriched it over the centuries.
"Rite is the liturgical, theological, spiritual and disciplinary heritage, distinguished according to peoples' culture and historical circumstances, that finds expression in each autonomous church's way of living the faith." — according to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (28 §1)[1]
It is remarkable that in the Western Church we have passed through a period from the mid 20th Century during which so much of our Latin Rite heritage has been ignored, forgotten, even tossed aside or rent violently. The term wreckovation[2] is used, and it's pretty accurate though it causes some to bristle.
The TLM movement is, in many respects, about recovering our Western Catholic heritage. That's not accomplished in equal measure everywhere, but the most vibrant communities around it place an emphasis on sacred music, restoring art and architecture as circumstances allow, and educating — catechizing is probably the better term — ourselves and our children so those efforts aren't merely about appearances or performance art, but an integral part of loving and worshipping God as we look to rebuild local Catholic culture.
So "obscurantism"? No, rather traditional expressions of the Catholic Faith given new sails (sometimes the winds are a bit stormy, to be sure). Some of us are learning Latin as we go along — the ordinary parts of the Mass are easy to pick up, and if you're coming from the Novus Ordo you already know what they mean even if you don't fully understand the Latin grammar. Certainly the priests of the ICKSP and FSSP study Latin in their seminaries, and many homeschooling families I know have Latin in their kids' curriculums. It's pretty amazing how quickly little kids pick it up when they participate in choir or serve as altar boys.
I want to provide one more response re: the SSPX/Williamson and whackjobs stuff, but I've already blown my HN comments time-budget today, so it will have to wait.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/la/apost_constit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wreckovation
> I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
I don't take offense, Dominus vobiscum.
I would claim as well that most people who attend TLM services do not in fact have any fluency in Latin, and would in support of that argument (but not that much support because I'm not going to take the time to dig up the source right now) point out the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test.
When I read your use of "obscurantism" previously, I mentally substituted something like "anachronistic, deliberately so, with the effect of obscuring [what the Mass is about, etc.]".
Wikipedia tells us "obscurantism has been defined as opposition to the dissemination of knowledge and as writing characterized by deliberate vagueness." A dictionary hit in DDG gives "a state of opposition to human progress or enlightenment."
So maybe that's what you had in mind? You mention (also in other HN comments):
> the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test
There is an anecdote like that regarding a US bishop:
https://thecatholicherald.com/four-reasons-francis-had-to-re...
There is something similar-ish from a meeting Francis had with Slovakian Jesuits in 2021:
https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/freedom-scares-us-pope-fr...
There's also Francis' "nostalgic disease" comments from 2023 — I remember those well because of the physical pain in my stomach and flushing in my neck after I read them. I had a similar visceral reaction when the credits rolled after the final episode of the new Battlestar Galactica (2003-09), but I digress.
https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/this-is-gods-style-pope-f...
So, your "tool of obscurantism" suggests perceived motive on the part of the trads. I think that's barking up the wrong tree.
"What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful." — https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/letters/2007/...
In my previous reply to you, I already outlined what I understand to be the true motives – recovering our Western Catholic heritage, treasuring it, passing it on to our children, building up local Catholic culture around it. I think Benedict XVI got that, per the quote above. We want orthodoxy (little "o"), beauty, reverence, faithfulness to the Apostolic Tradition.
The young priests not knowing much Latin while being gung ho for the TLM… well, that's not uncommon with young people, getting really enthusiastic about some big idea or thing while having limited knowledge and experience of the particulars and background. (How many exuberant Rustaceans fit that bill in recent years?) I don't see any reason to think those priests' motives were anything other than embracing something "sacred and great for us too".
The Latin-language requirements, following Summorum Pontificum, were given in Universae Ecclesiae: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_commissions/ec...
See section 20. The priest should be able to pronounce the words correctly and understand their meaning.
That's the same requirement as for e.g. an English speaking priest whose bishop asks him to prepare to regularly celebrate Mass in Spanish (or whatever). And it's the same for an English speaking Latin Rite priest asked by his bishop to accept biritual faculties to help out at the local Ukranian Catholic parish where they have the Byzantine Rite! In both of those cases it's great if the priest goes on to learn more of the language and culture of the people to whom he ministers, but it's not required to get started. I'm not just making that up, I know priests in both situations. In the case of the biritual priest, his "Hollywood Ukranian and church slavonic" (as he put it) got so good that people would walk up to him after the liturgy and start talking to him in Ukranian, and then be surprised that he couldn't hold a conversation in it.
Now, to be fair to the bishop and the cardinal who expected more, historically the minimum Latin competency for licit celebration was low, strictly speaking, but quite high for graduating seminary. I asked ChatGPT to provide an outline, didn't look up all the sources to see how much it hallucinated, but seems about right based on reading I've done over the years:
https://chatgpt.com/share/680bc83a-de6c-8011-9f2c-4c948d2229...
It's not as contradictory an arrangement as it might seem. The Church has generally held a low bar for validity and liceity, because people need the graces received in the sacraments, for their salvation! At the same time, and especially per the Council of Trent, it's understood to be critical that priests be well-educated and fully understand what they're about to avoid worlds of trouble that come from clergy just going through the motions.
Moving on to the congregation. As another HN commenter pointed it, the development and use of sacral language is part of the history of Christianity and, even discounting the TLM, it's still prominent in the Eastern churches to this day. It was/is not unusual for the congregation to not understand every prayer and response in the way they know and understand their native language. It's been just over half a century since Latin was phased out almost completely in favor of translations for celebrating the Latin Rite (despite what Vatican II decreed), but it had stood the test of time for centuries. (Of course there were controversies too like the Protestant Reformation, such quibbles.) I can't understand why it's making a comeback should be a huge stumbling block, in the big picture, again looking to our Western Catholic heritage and e.g. its treasury of sacred music.
So this is getting really long, and it's time for me to leave off, though I'll look for your reply in case you make another one. I just won't be going for another round here.
I do want to say a couple of things about the SSPX, mainly general points, because I do not have much personal experience with them — I've read things, I've met some folks who used to be SSPXers, that's about it.
There were a couple of articles on Williamson written recently, published shortly after his death. The insidethevatican page has some biographical information that helps with context and I recommend it for that purpose — Williamson led an unusual life along an uncommon path:
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/01/30/expelled-soci...
https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-17-2025-t...
I've archived those pages to share with people, as the need arises, because I think they show how dangerously self-destructive it can be to give oneself over to nuttery. Williamson built a cell around himself and carried it with him everywhere he went; under pressure, he pulled the bars in tighter and draped them with razor wire. He died isolated from the movement to which he committed his life earlier and his memory will amount to little more than a warning and the repulsiveness of extremism.
The SSPX came about in a time of tumult and confusion. Its founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, saw its purpose as continuing the formation of priests and ministry of the sacraments in line with the reforms of the Council of Trent, serving hundreds of thousands of souls who felt adrift in the storms that followed Vatican II. That's really it, even if one sharply disagrees with their decisions and canonical irregularity, it's difficult to argue that they have another purpose or motives.
Later, and independently of the SSPX, there were clergy and laity all over the world with longings for the same. John Paul II made some concessions and then Benedict XVI with Summorum Pontificum. The Abbey of Fontgombault is an example of a monastery that switched back, with permission, unconnected to the SSPX. Fontgombault's later foundation, Clear Creek Abbey, also keeps with the traditional rites.
I know you will write what you think is true and say what you think needs to be said, e.g. giving warnings about supposed tradcath links to antisemitism. I get it. But keep in mind that Williamson is a bit like a crazy third cousin uncle that most of us non-SSPX-trads don't think or care much about. Even among the SSPX he's a pariah. Also keep in mind that the Internet can act like a huge megaphone distorting representation of a community in terms of its most obnoxious members.
Strictly speaking, as well as the Tridentine Mass, one can also have the current Mass in Latin. From what I've heard (never been to one to experience it first hand), Opus Dei centres worldwide say it almost every day. Outside Opus Dei, I believe it is quite niche – but, strictly speaking, all Catholic priests (of the Latin Church, or Eastern rite with Latin faculties) are allowed to say the current Mass in Latin, and Traditionis custodes didn't do anything to change that. I think few are interested, and from what I've heard, to try to prevent people shifting from Tridentine-in-Latin to current Mass-in-Latin, bishops have been quietly instructed by Rome to disallow it in practice, even if it is still formally allowed on paper. However, if a priest wants to say the new Mass in Latin privately, or to a small group which isn't widely advertised and flies below the radar, I think that is both officially allowed and likely in practice too. But, the linguistic competence concerns you mention about Tridentine-in-Latin apply equally to current Mass-in-Latin.
Quite separately, there is a history of the Tridentine Mass being translated into other languages, both in some cases authorised by Rome, and also by external groups such as Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics, Polish National Catholic Church – I think all the cases of this in communion with Rome have all effectively lapsed through disuse. But still, it is another reason people ought to avoid equating Latin and Tridentine.
> The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
I think a big potential problem with what Pope Francis did – it made no difference to the quasi-schismatic SSPX, or the more explicitly schismatic groups to their right, who were very used to ignoring everything the Pope said (except maybe if they liked what he was saying on that occasion) – but it upset that minority of Catholics who were involved in the TLM within the Catholic Church proper, and potentially drove them into the arms of those more schismatic groups. Now, to what extent has that potential been fulfilled in practice, I don't have enough personal experience of this topic to say–but I'm sure it has happened in some cases, however many. And I know there are even quite a few conservative-leaning Catholics who weren't involved in TLM in practice, but found the decision upsetting, and it might increase the odds of them wandering off as well.
Of course, the people we are talking about are a small minority in comparison to over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But most of that one billion are far from devout – people who rarely attend Mass. At the more devout end, at least in some geographies, those involved in TLM, or who aren't but were upset by this papal decision, are arguably much more significant. And much of the institutional strength of any religion comes from its devout minority, as opposed to millions of people who identify with it at some level but far more rarely actively engage with it.
So, I think even if one doesn't have any personal affinity for the Tridentine Mass, there are genuine reasons to question the prudence of this decision.
Lots of religions have liturgical languages which are nobody's mother tongue any more. Orthodox Judaism has Hebrew (Reform/Conservative/etc too, albeit with variably greater use of vernacular): many diaspora Jews have limited Hebrew proficiency, and even for those who speak Modern Hebrew, the liturgy is in mediaeval Hebrew, which has significant differences. And some of the prayers (including quite important ones like the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre said on Yom Kippur) are in Aramaic. Most Muslims pray in Arabic despite the fact that less than 20% speak it natively, and even for those who do, modern vernacular Arabic has diverged a lot from the classical Arabic of the Quran and the prayers. The Russian Orthodox Church prays, not in Russian, but in Church Slavonic, which is a (somewhat Russified) descendant of mediaeval Bulgarian, which comes from a different branch of the Slavic language family. The Greek Orthodox liturgy is in mediaeval Greek, not modern Greek – many Middle Eastern Greek Orthodox have Arabic as their mother tongue, and many ethnic Greeks in Anglophone countries have quite limited Greek proficiency, yet still attend services in the language. The Coptic Church still uses Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian, for its liturgy. The Ethiopian Church uses Ge'ez. The Syriac Churches use Syriac/Aramaic. (And what I just said of those Eastern churches is also true of many Eastern Catholics.) Many Theravada Buddhists pray in Pali. Many Mongolian Buddhists pray in Tibetan (there are many Anglophone Buddhists who pray in Tibetan too). Many Hindus pray in Sanskrit.
Having a special language set aside for prayer, a holy tongue (Lashon Hakodesh, as many Jews call Hebrew) is something a lot of people find spiritually beneficial, across numerous unrelated religious traditions. It can give people a sense of an encounter with the deep past of their own tradition. It can make a religious community feel more unified despite being divided between different mother tongues. And most Catholics, pre-1970, thought the same thing.
It wasn't like people couldn't understand it – they followed English-Latin parallel prayer books, just like people follow English-Hebrew parallel books in many synagogues today. Globally, very many Catholics have a Romance language as their mother tongue, which is historically descended from Latin, which helps with understanding some of the words. Even though English isn't, the heavy infusion of Latin (both directly and via French) into English helps achieve some of the same thing.
I think if I'd grown up Catholic with Latin instead of the vernacular, my understanding of Latin would be a lot better. I feel like I missed out on something there.
So one definitely doesn't have to be a regular Latin Mass goer – I've never been to one in my life, I've thought about doing it but its always just been too out of my way – to wonder if the Church has lost something by throwing away so much of its linguistic heritage. Personally, I'd be quite happy with a kind of compromise in which Latin was much more heavily used but the majority of Masses were still vernacular. Which I actually think is what Vatican II intended, I think the Council's original vision was closer to majority vernacular / minority Latin, than the almost-all-vernacular / almost-no-Latin which actually evolved afterwards.
And this is a separate issue from the Tridentine liturgy – you can say the Mass of Paul VI in Latin and you can say the Tridentine Mass in English (Roman Catholics never have, but some Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and schismatic Catholic churches do it)
My Greek Orthodox friends growing up definitely spoke Greek!
And the fact is, if Latin doesn’t attract many ordinary people, will anything else? Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is full of grand evangelistic plans to “get people back to church”, the vast majority of which produce very little results. If anything, niche offerings such as Latin masses or Anglican Use or Eastern Catholicism at least have a bit of a ”it’s different” factor to draw people in with.
But again: drawing people isn't the point. Francis didn't crack down on TLM because he thought it was a bad way to get people to show up at mass! He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird. It's a doctrinal thing, not a marketing strategy.
What’s “weird” is in the eye of the beholder - a lot of stuff Francis saw as “weird”, JP2 and B16 may have seen as significantly less “weird”; conversely, JP2 and B16 may well have seen some of Francis’ own decisions as “weird”.
I know one of the big complaints against TLM communities is that many of them question the validity of Vatican II. But, given B16 as a young theologian authored his famous (in the rarified subfield of Catholic/Orthodox ecumenical theology) “Ratzinger proposal”, that reunion with the Orthodox should not require them to accept post-schism councils as binding - which implicitly downgrades the authority of all 13 post-schism councils from Lateran I to Vatican II inclusive, [0] maybe he’d view doubting Vatican II a bit more charitably than Francis ever could. And, among the more liberal/progressive-leaning Catholics (for whom Francis rather obviously had a significant degree of sympathy), there’s a long tradition of questioning the validity of Vatican I - and I suspect Francis was much more sympathetic to doubting the first than the second.
And then there’s also the Eastern Catholic followers of the late Lebanese Melkite archbishop Elias Zoghby, who rejected the ecumenicity of Vatican II (despite being one of its Fathers) on the grounds that a genuinely ecumenical council would require full Orthodox participation, hence denying that status to all post-schism councils - I suspect Francis would have seen that as much less “weird”, despite its superficial overlap with traditionalist views on Vatican II, since he’d be more sympathetic to the motivations behind it. Zoghby’s opposition to Vatican II’s validity wasn’t solely a matter of abstract theological principle, it was also about its substance - at it, he argued that Eastern Catholics should be allowed to observe the traditional Eastern leniency on divorce rather than being forced to conform to the Latin Church’s principled opposition to it, but he lost that argument-but yet again, likely something Francis had more sympathy for than the Latin traditionalist objections to the council’s substance
[0] there is also the problem of the 8th council, which is a pre-schism council; there are two competing claimants to the title of “Fourth Council of Constantinople”, the first in 869-870, the second in 879-880; Catholics accept the first as the 8th ecumenical council and reject the second as invalid; Orthodox reject the first as invalid and accept the second, but disagree among themselves as to whether to class it as the 8th ecumenical council or as sub-ecumenical; and then there’s also the Quinisext Council of 692 (aka Council in Trullo), which many Orthodox view as quasi-ecumenical, Catholics as local to the East; and then the fact that some Orthodox claim one of their own post-schism councils as ecumenical (the fifth council of Constantinople, 1341-1368) - Ratzinger’s proposal didn’t address these conciliar esoterica, but maybe they aren’t that important given so few get worked up about them
Mark 16:15.
Hebrews 10:25.
The Church organisation is very distinct from the church. And anything that increases their participation is in line with scripture. Both growth and attendance are important.
There's already evidence it works. And it's something that sets the church apart.
Romans 12:2 indeed.
In Antioch [Acts 11:26] people were first called Christians. They weren't the regular people of that time. But people with something that made them visibly different from the Hoi Polloi.
What really is the point of a consecration that doesn't change you? What are you being set apart from?
My reply is primarily about Church growth and the importance of fellowship.
Wherever you go, don't imagine this sentiment is American/Western only as many have claimed/alluded.
If Christ doesn't change you nothing really has changed.
Proselytizing by active action and being examples by our (different/changed post conversion) behaviour are duties of everyone in Christ. As is fellowship.
As exemplified by those who do it in countries and areas where it might mean death like where I live today.
"Take up your cross and follow me" indeed.
The approach of some recently arrived evangelists has been slammed by some Aboriginal leaders, including Labor senator Pat Dodson.
"They are a type of virus that has really got no credibility," he said. "If they really understood the gospel then the gospel is about liberation.
"It's about an accommodation of the diversity and differences that we have in our belief systems."
He believes the destruction of traditional culture is "an act of bastardry".
"It's about the lowest act you could perform in trying to indicate to a fellow human being that you have total disdain for anything they represent."
But the born-again Christian converts have defended their beliefs and practices, saying it is their decision to make, and finding God has brought them peace and happiness.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
I don't know if I should bother pointing out why.
* https://kelsolawyers.com/au/paedophile_offenders/brother-kea...
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-29/child-sex-abuse-royal...
These new links are even more irrelevant from that perspective.
One does not necessarily imply or require or constrain the other.
I never studied Latin, but I don't find it difficult at all to keep up. A lot of churches that have TLM have the missal booklet with Latin on one page and vernacular on the facing page.
While I do appreciate the richness of the daily propers and miss understanding them, it doesn't bother me enough to avoid the TLM.
As a kinda-sorta Christian (raised Catholic), I've long admired the Jewish approach to the Mourner's Kaddish prayer said when a loved one dies: It's not about the deceased, nor even about death — it's about G-d. It starts out (in English translation): "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will."
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/text-of-the-mourner...
If I were to say one pope that many have been fond of, it's probably John Paul II.
gifted all women indissoluble marriage, which was practiced by the Roman aristocracy as "confarreatio".
This was trashed as soon as possible, and the trashing was billed as great progress.
Also the condom thing is false. Keep up to date.
lots of christians didn't like him, considering he was too progressive
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/26/how-peopl...
I'd researched popes' policies and statements toward the poor some years back, and he really had no peer going back centuries.
Partial exception in the late 1900s, under Leo XIII (1878--1903), in the encyclical Rerum novarum.
But yes, one thing is statements another is actions, regarding the latter the Latin Church's actions have often not been in keeping with their lofty writings.
I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/05/29/187009384/...
Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
(And by "interesting", I mean that it is yet another of example cognitive dissonance amongst fundamentalists. If anyone can be redeemed, it implies that atheists can, as well.)
> I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
Indeed. He was not perfect but he was better than most. I hope the next one won’t be a catholic version of patriarch Kirill.
Haven't really been paying attention. Wasn't he the one who got Russia into defending persecuted Christians wherever (Syria etc)?
> From a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people, defending the single spiritual space of Holy Rus', fulfill the mission of the "Restrainer", protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.
> After the end of the SVO, the entire territory of modern Ukraine must enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia. The possibility of the existence on this territory of a Russophobic political regime hostile to Russia and its people, as well as a political regime controlled from an external center hostile to Russia, must be completely excluded.
https://www-patriarchia-ru.translate.goog/db/text/6116189.ht...
(The recognition of saints is a little different, happening always after their death and depending on some degree of regional consensus. It's sloppy but whatever, it is actually not as similar as it might look.)
As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation. My wife (now atheist, but grew up evangelical) often has to correct me when I make snide remarks about Christianity. Recently I made some comment about hypocrisy amongst Christians for supporting a multiply-divorced man who bragged about groping women for president (who has probably never read the bible), to say nothing of the people around him. She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?" and then went on to list the "questionable" relationships in her own youth group. (I am NOT saying all Christians are like this, but religion is often used to cover up or excuse misdeeds).
It is not unique to Christianity or even Islam, though. You're seeing a lot of religion being used to justify many terrible things, including many smaller ones in Africa and Asia that have been used to justify atrocities and genocide.
I think she is right for some of these people. It is a human reaction, but it is still a moral failing. The proper Christian (well, Catholic, anyway) thing to do would be what is expected in a confession: recognise one’s failings, express regret, and accept consequences, including punishment. Then comes redemption.
Something that irks me fundamentally with most Christian religions is how they believe that they are Good People because they accepted God and rejected Evil. It’s all good as long as you play the part. Once you start looking for excuses, you failed twice: first, because of your behaviour, and then for failing to repent. If you support someone because he made the same error you did, then you fail yet again. This behaviour is understandable, but trippy incorrect from a religious perspective and very hypocritical.
In the grand scheme of things, it is very easy to get forgiveness, you just have to be sincere in your regrets (again, for Catholics, which is what I know).
I know there are wonderful ministers, christians, and people of all religions. But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people. And those people want strict control, making mistakes (often the way people learn best) is not tolerated by them. It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Sorry I misinterpreted. Protestant denominations are convenient for politics, because there are so many of them and hey have so different positions.
> In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do.
That’s fertile ground for extremism and reinforces the group dynamics, for sure.
> Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I think Pascal wrote something about this behaviour. I won’t chase the source but IIRC the conclusion was that these people were hypocrites using religion to be terrible people and I tend to agree. Personally I find also weird to believe that God is so easily fooled, but that’s just me.
> But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people.
Definitely. It is too effective as a tool for control and coercion. At least the Catholic Church mostly retreated from this. They do some lobbying but nobody is asking for a Catholic theocracy anywhere that I know of.
> It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Yes. It is the end of enlightenment and the end of liberal democracies if enough people behave that way. These people are functionally similar to the imams who keep babbling about the shariah, it’s time we see them that way.
That’s an interesting correlation. Do you have any ideas about the dynamics associated with it?
I do seem to remember experiencing my tradition as less manipulative when I was young, but have never been sure if that was me not seeing it. And if true, I’m not sure whether to attribute it to size, or the internet, or political influence, or something else.
It is traditional for the EP to visit Rome on the patronal Feast of Saints Peter and Paul and for the Pope to visit Istanbul on the Feast of Saint Andrew, which is apparently when the friendship first formed. My absolute favorite story about Francis is his deciding to send some of the most precious relics in the Vatican to Bartholomew as a gift: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-09/pope-francis... (That sent some people into a fury).
Actually, it's my second favorite story. My favorite story is his insistence that he live in the Vatican guesthouse (and not the Papal apartments). Or perhaps the fact that as archbishop of Buenos Ares he insisted on taking the subway.
I believe that had mainly power reasons, because pope Paul II was pretty out of the loop, what the cardinals were doing.
And Francis likely expected to face opposition in what he was doing, so being closer to the "people" was likely helpful on having an eye on them.
It's quite a bit above our pay grade to proclaim categorically who supposedly cannot be redeemed; it verges on blasphemy.
Cf. Job. 38:
1. Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?
3 "Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
5 "Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 "On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—
7 "while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?"
(etc.)
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...
Cheers! As I understand the term blasphemy, our presumptuous species has a great deal to assert about the unknowable. ^_^
I think the author's intent is to remind us that some things are simply beyond our ken (to which I'd add: For now).
Edited to add: this is a single passage with verse markings.
And the idea that atheists can be saved isn't novel in Catholic teaching – it is implicit in the Holy Office's 1949 condemnation of Feeneyism, [0] in which it declared that a person who doesn't believe in Catholicism due to "invincible ignorance" can be saved by an "implicit desire" for God. Although it didn't include the case of atheists, it didn't exclude them either – suggesting that an atheist who doesn't believe in God in their head (due to some intellectual issue) but nonetheless believes in God in their heart can be saved.
I'm racking my brain right now dissecting what that even means. Believing there is no one but wishing it wasn't so?
Hence, anyone who loves Good loves God... so a person who truly loves Good, but who due to some intellectual obstacle, isn't able to call that Good "God" – from a Catholic viewpoint, it can be said that they love God without knowing that it is God whom they love – and by that love they can be saved
If you start from the assumption that Christianity is true, and some people know this, and others don't – you have to ask why the people who don't know it, don't know it. And this is where Catholic theology distinguishes between "vincible" and "invincible" ignorance - "vincible" means the ignorance is your own fault, "invincible" means your ignorance is through no fault of your own.
How to distinguish the two? Ultimately, it is up to God to decide – nobody else knows for sure what's going on in your head. At best, theologians would give some examples of hypothetical situations which could be said to be one or the other – but the real world is often much messier than any such hypothetical can capture.
Which is part of why, the traditional Catholic teaching, is that (with rare exceptions) you can't actually know where people are going to end up. The idea is that if you make it to heaven, you might be surprised to find a lot of people there you weren't expecting, and also maybe some people you were sure would be there aren't.
That is, I don't find it fundamental to our psychology nor history. To address your perspective.
It's an atheists view, sure. It assumes that if one god is real, then all gods must be real. Because in the mind of the atheist, all are equal in that they are imaginary or, at best, avatars of psychological phenomena.
It necessarily assumes the inverse logic that if 1,999 gods are fake, then 2,000 gods must be fake.
Again, because they are all fundamentally equal. And therefore it is the Christians that are illogical because they have dismissed 1999 gods as fake but couldn't quite get there for the Last God Standing.
I believe that's the sum of it.
Which is a statement that about illustrates the intellectual limit for atheism. I will give Ricky credit for that much.
Where Ricky's quip stops and Christian logic starts is that Christians know that their singular God is not imaginary nor an avatar, but is a living being. With the figurative 1999 additional gods indeed being either imaginary, psychological avatars, or worse.
Which is clear to the Christian, because he understands something singularly fundamental about Christianity's God that others may not. This fundamental characteristic, at minimum, is the difference between real and fake.
At which point the atheist would quip that there is no logic to see the Christian God as different from the other 1999 Gods, and as concrete.
The Christian would finish up with telling the atheist that their failure to see the difference is a failure in being able to interpret the Bible, a failure in being able to interpret the Christian religion, and a failure to understand their own nature including from where they come.
Some of this lack of understanding on the part of atheists is rooted in a lack of perspective that is otherwise glaringly true, and a lack of logical rigor. In other words, they take too many lies on faith.
The conversation frequently continues with a debate over supposed proofs rooted in belief (faith) for atheists.
With the Christian making more general appeals to their own faith that is rooted in Biblical and religious interpretation, ideally combined with their own verifying observations about the nature of the World.
Or, for those who have blindly committed based on instinct, then just appeals to faith alone. Which is also acceptable, because it is a correct instinct. Being a Christian doesn't hinge on knowledge alone. It hinges on faith. There are good reasons for this state of affairs.
What both sides will agree on is that he who believes in the least lies "wins" so to speak. The process of parsing being roughly parallel to discovering the rules of a game. The disagreement is over the substance of the lies. What Judeo-Christianity does is attempt to convey those rules in clear-enough language, even if the motivation to follow them is solely based on faith. With deeper Bible reading often being revelatory for greater insight.
Whereas the atheist dismisses the traditional rules out of lack of faith and lack of understanding, and often then devolves into inventing his own rules. Which is specifically against the rules, but does align with the atheist's chaos theory of his own existence.
I would argue that reading random quotes without context can be misleading. Unless of course you believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired bible - which is a fairly extreme position to take.
Those two statements don't follow. You can believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired Bible and still think taking random quotes out of context is bad exegesis.
Not my best-crafted piece of self-expression I will admit.
This is a random Bible search website to show some verses about hell. I was not implying that all of these verses are definitive treatments of hell or anything similar.
However you will notice that what is said in these verses is generally not "hell is just emptiness". So even if very little is said about hell, to me the appropriate response to that is not "it doesn't say much so I'm just gonna believe whatever I want" (if you also claim the Bible is divinely inspired and the underpinning of your entire religion).
> Beyond that you're not really gonna get a lot of consistency on topics.
This just seems like moving the goalposts to me. There's not a lot of consistency in talking about the "kingdom of heaven / god" but there are a LOT of passages that describe it. Many more than describe hell in any form. That doesn't mean that hell couldn't be a real thing but it's not a thing that's very present in the canonical text. Christian thought goes far beyond the contents of the traditional bible, but if you want to argue for a "paradise lost" hell or somesuch, you need to cast your lot with thinkers beyond the old and new testament authors.
That said, I don't think any of my sibling comments have responded with sources that ignore the biblical text. I think Ehrman is a bit liberal to stand in for all of christendom, but he's a respected scholar and I think his analysis is not in the category of "ignoring the text and inserting his own beliefs."
I've always just assumed the descriptions that work to keep people fearful of leaving the religion as whatever is used at the time (saying this as somebody who is agnostic).
"Hell is a place of fire and torment" is explicitly Biblical (Luke 16), even if there are also mentions of Hell without that (and some mentions of fire and torment without calling it "Hell").
Annihilationism vs Eternal Conscious Torment is the main point that isn't given a perfectly clear answer in scripture; there are verses that hint toward each.
Limbo and Purgatory are not in the Bible, but predate Dante. "Deal with the Devil" predates Dante and is only weakly founded in scripture. "Devils" (plural, as opposed to "the Devil") being distinct from "Demons" is a translation artifact, popularized by Dungeons & Dragons. There being various types of demons long precedes Dante. Variants of Universalism (including "Nobody goes to Hell" and "it's possible to escape Hell") are explicitly rejected in scripture.
Those are all the aspects of "modern concept of hell" that I can think of (let me know if you can think of more), and the connection to Dante seems pretty weak.
It's always a mistake to assume the Bible has a singular, coherent, intentional narrative. Parts of it were written before the Israelites were even monotheists. It has as many Gods as it has authors.
Is this a way of saying I don’t believe there is a place like hell?
And then I realized the real meaning of the quote. Made me cry a little.
This could also explain why some simple creatures, with no real conscious experience, don’t overpopulate heaven or Hell: they have no souls with which to populate it with. They are just matter, temporarily constructed into some form resembling a living thing.
So hell is empty, and evil is the result of soulless automatons created by accident in our world. So if you die and nothing else happens for you after, then you were a p-zombie, with no soul.
Perhaps he chose the “god is good” over the “god, despite being able, will not prevent billions of reasonable and decent people from suffering eternally” fork in the road. You can’t logically choose both, and if you’re the pope, you probably had better have a belief in the goodness of god.
There is an older stream of christian thought on heaven and hell, still somewhat present in eastern christianity, that they are not separate places people are sent to.
In this view they are the same thing, simply the direct experience of the unattenuated light of god. A repentant person will experience this as mercy and all encompassing love, an unrepentant one will experience it as excruciating shame and terror. But they are both getting the same "treatment" so to speak.
Hell, whatever it is, is where people end up when they'd rather be there than be with Christ.
God will never force you to love Him and accept Him. He gives you the choice, the rest is up to you.
According to Catholic teaching, non-Christians can be saved if (1) they are "invincibly ignorant" (i.e. their ignorance of the truth of Christianity is not their own fault), and (2) they have an "implicit desire" for the Christian God
Whatever your beliefs are, they aren’t catholicism.
I am not sure which label I should use for myself besides Christian as in 'follower of Christ', who tries to follow the Bible as accurately as possible, believing it to be the direct and absolute message from God.
Which indeed makes me incompatible with Catholicism.
As a Catholic, I often found myself both inspired and unsettled by him. His theology wasn’t always systematic, but it was deeply Ignatian, rooted in discernment, encounter, and movement toward the margins. Francis often chose gestures over definitions, and presence over proclamations. That doesn't always scale well in a Church that spans continents, cultures, and centuries.
His legacy will be debated. But I think what made him so compelling, especially to someone who lives in the modern world but tries to be formed by ancient faith is that he forced us to confront the tension between tradition and aggiornamento not as an abstract debate, but as something lived.
He reminded me that the Church isn’t a museum, nor is it a startup. It’s something stranger.. the best I can described it is a body that somehow survives by dying daily.
- Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
It seems Pope Francis had his share of critics—those who opposed his beliefs or feared his vision. And yet, he stood firm and made people think. In that sense, perhaps even his enemies affirmed the impact he was making.
"Opponent"? "Antagonist"?
Being in that mode opens a window to yourself no other state can open. You'll find what makes you tick, and what you are prepared to go through to make out alive in this situation.
You'll be tested in your might, intelligence and more importantly, ethical and moral limits.
The saying "You don't know how much violence it took for me to be this gentle." has roots in this perspective, so as my favorite quote from Murakami:
> And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Source: Anime and Pokemon games :)
I think the problem with enemies is 1) vindictiveness and 2) ineffectiveness.
Everyone dislikes some actions and ideas, and thus dislikes people who express those actions and ideas. Every group has enemy groups, who they oppose and who oppose them, even if they're not explicitly named.
A problem is when people start opposing others who don't express the actions and ideas they oppose, because they resemble the people who do. Anger generalizes, sometimes to ethnic groups, sometimes to the entire world.
Another problem is when people attack others in ways that don't stop their actions or ideas. Violence doesn't seem to promote its ideas in the long term, and it can backfire. Jesus might be the greatest example of this.
The way to kill actions is through counter-actions, and the way to kill ideas is through counter-ideas. These counter-actions and counter-ideas can be ugly or violent, or they can be pretty or pacifist. But every action or idea opposes another action or idea, which could be considered an "enemy".
At the "world leader" level it's impossible to do a job in a way where everyone will think it's a good job, you're always going to piss off one group or another with practically any action in any direction.
IMO he took on one of the hardest tasks at the church which is "modernization". The way I look at it is the church is so old that it constantly needs modernization. But that comes at a steep cost as while you are attracting new parishioners, many of your older ones will scoff at the changes. And because of the church's age, this is something that must be done over and over and over again.
Is also why there are so many converts from Catholicism to New age sorts of Christian churches.
Although I personally wish Pope Francis had done certain things differently, God chose him for a reason. I will try reflect on that as I, along with the Church, pray for him.
Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.
The greater the errors of the Franciscan papacy in your view, the more you owe the man your prayers.
He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.
I totally agree in general. But I wouldn't say that the issues with Francis's style amounted to knee-jerk discomfort without concrete objections. The concrete objection is that many of his comments had to be read in a kind of maximally un-Gricean way to be squared with Church teaching.
Francis's deployment of ambiguity in communication isn't something I'm making up-- it was a highly unusual and distinctive element of his papacy, most notably evidenced in his refusal to respond to (quite concrete) dubia over seemingly unorthodox comments for seven years.
But if there is a silver lining, I suppose there has been no other pope in recent years that has occasioned more clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility, so there is that.
It does make the news. This is something we should be aware of. Here's just one such story: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-francis-samesex-bles..., not to mention the recent spats from VPOTUS.
I'm not convinced that every Catholic you know constitutes a representative sample of Catholics worldwide.
"In families, there are difficulties. In families, we argue; in families, sometimes the plates fly...In families, there are difficulties, but these difficulties are overcome with love. Hate doesn’t overcome any difficulty."
I think Pope Francis was committed to trying to dig through some of the shell to get to the godly bits of the religion, and this is deeply laudable. It was frankly weird to see the opposition to some of his seemingly obviously Christian stances. He'd say something like "I guess I don't really approve of gay people marrying, but I think we should be focusing on all of these suffering and dying poor people?" and then a bunch of people would bitch about it.
Naturally, the tiny but vocal minority of people who attended the TLM found Francis very activating. But it's important to know that those people are not broadly representative of the church as a whole. Most Catholics I know would barely offer a shrug if you told them (they certainly wouldn't already know) that Francis had restricted the TLM.
https://isidore.co/misc/Res%20pro%20Deo/Giussani's%20errors/...
I hope the next step is for people to understand that religious problems are actually people problems. And similar themes and tendencies appear in modern secular contexts.
Starting from his chosen name, since Franciscans and Jesuits have not been very close historically (although the founder of the latter was inspired by St. Francis).
From what I read, it's exactly as you say: people expect either a reaction swing to conservativism or a a big swing towards modernity. Pope Francis was old and could not do much, but he tried to set a path for the latter, afaiu.
I would like to know more. My impression is that most Christian institutions have long ago disentangled from scientific debate - providing interpretative value rather than alternative science. This is part of a larger trend to focus their scope and mission in modern life. Have the last few popes made comments on scientific issues?
(The exception is evangelical Americans.)
the fun thing, ironic itself, about dismissing religion in it's entirety is that most religions have long understood that G'd can't be proven, measured, captured with experiments. the irony in this is that while you can't prove G'd you can't disprove G'd either, so the lack of proof is no proof of a lack of "The Force". quantum physics did not not exist just because the was no proof for it.
one interesting train of thought in this regard was the conclusion of a book on the neurobiology of meditation, (the title escapes me right now): what if the only "instrument" to measure religious experience is the brain? we can measure effects of systematic religious practice on the brain, like meditation aka contemplative prayer. we can identify some aspects of states that humans describe as religious experience, in the brain, as they happen. why would we dismiss those as mere "brain formations"? while we accept equally measurable effects of sound or light on the brain as "real"?
it's non-trivial...
Science doesn’t say we are the only intelligent forms in the universe. Science doesn’t say intelligent max’s out with humans. Science doesn’t describe concepts outside of time and space.
A conversation with a Jesuit for example can be enlightening because they have intellectual and moral arguments, it’s not just castles built on the shifting foundations of a Bible verse.
This leads to different approaches compared to a lot of American Protestants. They don’t seek to undermine science.
As such, they've traditionally been more open, and a disproportionately high proportion of Jesuits have been scientists. At one point about 1/3 of all members of the Jesuit order were scientists.
"The pope's astronomer"[1] is a jesuit, and the Jesuits have a long tradition in astronomy, with the result of numerous lunar craters (e.g. McNally) and several asteroids named after Jesuits. More than once, Jesuits have also tangled with the question of extraterrestial life, e.g.[2a] - a question fraught by the question it would raise about what it would mean for belief [2b].
Wikipedia also has a long list of Catholic clergy scientists[3]. When reading it, it's worth considering that if anything they had more influence as teachers (e.g. Descartes, Mersenne were both educated at Jesuit colleges), and that the order ranged from low thousands to a few tens of thousands during the centuries the list covers.
With respect to the last few popes, the most notable recent intervention is Pope Francis making clear that he saw the theories of evolution and the Big Bang as real[4]. But already in 1950, even the deeply conservative Pope Pius XII, while expressing hope that evolution would prove to be a passing fad, made clear that catholic doctrine officially did not conflict with evolution. John Paul II formally acquitted Galileo, and stated that "truth cannot contradict truth", when talking about evolution vs. catholic doctrine. [5]
[1] https://www.deseret.com/faith/2024/07/27/vatican-observatory...
[2a] https://aleteia.org/2020/08/28/jesuit-astronomer-calls-extra...
[2b] https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/men-black-belief-aliens-no...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis...
[5] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/vatican...
I know several priests who are scientists or teachers/professors.
Evangelicals have a simpler dogma where the individual minister or church has more sway (hence the joke about the man on a desert island with a hut, a church, and a church he doesn’t go to). It’s a more populist form of worship, which has ups and downs.
I found it inspiring. I'm genuinely sad about the Pope's passing. He was a man who followed the teachings as he understood them.
Those are all political terms for politicians and their platforms or parties. They do not translate to Catholic doctrines or teachings. Y’all are simply parroting what the lamestream media wants to impose, a political veneer on non-politicians who are shepherds, pastors, teachers.
In the US, reactionaries are dumping lots on money on the church, and many bishops have embraced right wing politics, stupidly aligning with evangelicals who deeply despise Catholicism in the process.
Some of the moves made are comically dumb. The archbishop of New York decided to make a big show about denying communion to the notoriously vindictive former governor of the state. That governor subsequently changed the look back period for civil sex abuse lawsuits, which has bankrupted or is in the process of bankrupting dioceses as they are forced to own up to their failures to protect children.
This is a Catholic media group. It uses the words as above. Think Karl Rahner or Yves Congar.
Bishops and Cardinals are very much political animals.
And the Catholic Church exists on the world stage, and is involved in politics. Its leadership can be and is political.
But the College has a mind of its own, and there is going to be some furious horse trading happening behind the scenes to steer the result in one direction or the other.
I don't think that was necessarily what he was doing.
He tried to rebalance it to include a lot more cardinals from the developing world–who on average tend to be more conservative, at least on some issues. He arguably avoided the more outspoken conservatives, but he would have caught up a lot of quieter conservatives in the process.
Whereas, if he just wanted to stack it with progressives, he would have focused on adding cardinals from the developed world, where Catholic progressivism is arguably the strongest.
His speech yesterday (he dictated it I guess) was very very political, not on the usual level, felt like a finally "all out" for me.
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/urbi/do...
But Love him or Hate him. Rest in peace.
>> Love has triumphed over hatred, light over darkness and truth over falsehood.
This is interesting since I thought he was displeased about recent world events (e.g. Trump's election, shift towards deglobalization, ...).
and btw, in that little collection of booklets we call the Bible, the story doesn't end all flowery and pink either. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, early disciples are martyred in troves and everybody is aware the story of that Jesus guy and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Junia and all the others just has begun.
and it's clear it has to be written by us...
so regarding the recent world events yes PP Francis was heavily displeased (he talks about several of them in the very text we respond to here) but the Jesus thing gives us confidence and hope and justification to actively do something about it and to nudge the world into being a better place, for all of us.
that's how I think PP Francis meant what he said. and it's definitively how I see it.
— Gandalf
The salient parts that support your view:
---
There can be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and respect for the views of others.
Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament. The light of Easter impels us to break down the barriers that create division and are fraught with grave political and economic consequences. It impels us to care for one another, to increase our mutual solidarity, and to work for the integral development of each human person.
I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the “weapons” of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!
May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
The sentiment sounds great but I think we now see in the real world with Ukraine that if you rely [too much] on others (re: US), you have a real problem if they are no longer there for you. Peace through strength is real.
I sincerely hope the new pope will be as human, humble and pushing for renewal as Francis.
I think that after such a pope, people won't be satisfied with just another symbolic figure with empty gestures, hard conservative views and no real substance.
The world would be better off if many a leader these days, religious or otherwise, would be a bit more like him.
> Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican has announced. - Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to lead the Catholic Church in March 2013 after Pope Benedict XVI stood down.
> May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
Yes. I agree with you and hope so too.
(FWIW I'm atheist, always been.)
I understand that a leader of an organization that acts on historic time scale might be reluctant to take sides in contemporary conflicts. Nevertheless always washing your hands in every conflict is not morality, it is cowardice. It enables evil and is in direct conflict with "narratives and morals matter".
How to describe such a unique pontiff? Coming from "the end of the world," as he said, he truly represented a peculiar voice.
He stands alone as the greatest international symbol of our age, an embodiment of its most salient characteristics. A man whose presence will remain indelible in our minds, and who really made his presence known in the Church.
His fierce defense of his ideas, no matter what, marked the Church of our time forever. Catholics will never forget him. Traditional Catholics, in particular, will always vividly remember his legacy.
May he rest in peace.
source: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2025/04/francis-pope-who-w...
Maybe he was merely good at pointing out the obvious, maybe it's what the church needed/needs?
Surprised noone here has mentioned yet that Pope Francis was only the second pope ever with a social-media strategy (Pope Benedict was the first, in 2012 [0][1], and didn't get as much traction as Pope Francis).
"The Most Followed World Leaders on Social Media 2022" [2] ranked Pope Francis 3rd in 2022 with 53m followers, which is/was still low compared to singers, sports stars, celebrities and tech figures. It would obviously be crass and reductive to try to estimate the Pope's impact this way (and not, say, country visits, appointments, encyclicals, other official statements, reaction/criticism by other religous/political figures, administrative and legal actions, measures of popularity by specific groups, by factions, by country, by politics or religion), but as traditional media channels become less relevant, the Vatican will presumably have to move with the times, as in many other ways.
Maybe the better question (as Dick Cheney would have put it) is which voices do/don't determine the media narrative on Pope Francis' papacy?
As to your take (that he was wasn't that far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but often portrayed as more liberal and constantly taken out of context), that's the debate we're largely about to see happen.
[0]: "Pope Joins Twitter: Benedict XVI's Screenname Will Be @Pontifex" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4897631
[2]: https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-most-followed-world...
Hopefully, the next pope will also champion unity, inclusivity, and peace, and oppose religious dogmatism. This will define the future of Christianity. Many challenges remain for the institution.
Here's a Reuters list for possible Francis successors: https://www.reuters.com/world/who-might-succeed-pope-francis.... Usually, Reuters does thorough due diligence before releasing something. So I'd expect their predictions are accurate.
His proclamation on blessing LGBT people caused a rift with the Church in Africa (remember why we have Anglicans as part of the Catholic Church?) threatening an area that's seeing church growth.
He's also had his mouth closed about the killings of Catholics in Africa and Asia by extremists.
This is one source I found. It's supposed to be in Pew Research but I can't use that site.
You're talking as though I'm talking about a return to Latinate Mass for everyone. It's supposed to be optional but it's being actively suppressed like some heresy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/latin-mass...
Including it's use in Novus Ordo Missae and a bias against orthodoxy in general.
Apart from that there's the comments here against the importance of fellowship and evangelism to others actively and passively. Also a denial that being part of the church, Catholic or not (as one in Christ) is supposed to change you. What's the point of it all if it doesn't?
Anything outside that, regardless of how progressive it seems, is inconsistent with church teachings.
May we live his consistent reminder of refraining from hurting and hating each other regardless of country, race, religion, politics, etc.
Under his watch he did not move the church to fully acknowledge or deal with the historical and widespread abuses the organization he led was involved with. He had opportunity to be the leader to bring the organization around and he did not. Let's all hope his replacement will.
May the next pope feel emboldened to further this as the church itself becomes less of a lumbering monster.
1. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/catholic (definition 1)
“If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” Francis said while pretending to throw a punch in his direction.
He added: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”[0]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebd...
Why not? The concept of proportionality between an “offense” and a response that characterizes the liberal worldview was entirely missing here. If one chooses to take offense about some deeply held personal view, whatever it is, then fine; but let your response be proportional.
The music of Beethoven is sacred to me, let’s say, but I’m not prepared to murder you if you mock it, or miss a note in performance.
The pope’s threat of physical intervention himself seems at odds with the teachings of his own faith, too, as I understand them. Turn the other cheek, and all. But that would be for adherents to say for sure.
As Christians are being massacred in Africa at the hands of muslims, as Christianity is besieged, all he did was simp for one group in specific and scold everyone else.
Even scolded Greece for not wanting to share the same fate as some Western European countries.
If you insult unhinged people (and people who kill over a mere 'offense' to their religion are unhinged), don't be surprised when you receive an unhinged response back.
That being said, as an American, the culture of mocking and gracefully learning from being mocked runs deep in my blood. I don't know if others share that same worldview.
That didn’t happen. The person you mean was Buzz Aldrin and it looks like there weren’t even charges filed, and there was no judge involved.
This is quickly getting forgotten.
I'm far from American, but have the same "blood", but I think it has nothing to do with being American/Swedish/Spanish/whatever, some people have different personalities, upbringings and strengths/weaknesses simply.
Americans aren't "tougher-skinned" by default or anything, at least I didn't get that experience from interacting with Americans.
The quote in question talks about your cheek, not your mother's or anyone else's. In many circumstances, you're not as free to forego the defense of others as you are your own.
Such an attitude is abhorrent and shameful.
> Francis spoke about the Paris attacks while on his way to the Philippines, where around 1,500 Muslims protested yesterday against the depictions of the Prophet in the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. [0]
He also explicitly condemned violence:
> Francis insisted that it was an “aberration” to kill in the name of God and said religion can never be used to justify violence. [0]
So, he wasn't justifying the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebd...
Now, contrast with Islamic teachings. Not every Muslim will advocate for Sharia, but there is a non-negligible part of them (leadership included) who think that not advocating for Sharia is a sin.
What country with a majority Islamic population is currently going through a secularization process?
In any case, I only care about the practicalities. In terms of what they try to achieve, there’s no real difference between the Christian and Muslim dominionists.
And centuries of liberal democracies where the church was just one institution that had no direct rule over its subjects?
In general, the Church's political power has waned over the last 500 years or so, but there are an awful lot of calls from Republicans saying that this is where we have gone wrong.
One only look to the political donations of Opes Dei (Catholic branch dedicated to getting Cristian influence over the "Lay" sphere) to see them as major power players today. The Heritage Foundation (main writers of Project 2025) are intimately bound with the organization. And Chief Justice Roberts is also associated.
So they may not be "direct" rulers, they are major power players.
So are all the other countless media companies, tech corporations, Hollywood, labor unions, pharma companies, academia...
From this list, which one do you think is more intertwined with Government affairs? The Catholic Church or Amazon? The Mormons or Blueshield? Seventh Day Adventists or Disney? The Baptists or General Motors? The Anglicans or FOX News?
I am not going to argue that the democratic institutions are not under attack, but I am arguing that there is no key religious figure remotely close to take power and become the head of State, at any level whatsoever.
Killing someone for insulting Christianity => goes against Christian theology.
Killing someone for insulting islam/moe => completely in line with Islam.
Dude I can not believe how it can be anything but horrible to make acts of terrorism and killing of innocent anything but the worst humans can do.
The idea of a "Christian equivalent" to Sharia law is actually very fringe. The near unanimous teaching of Christianity, from the Church Fathers through to the mainstream Reformers, is that the criminal laws in the Jewish Torah were only ever intended for Jews, and Christians are not bound by the letter of them – they could be used as a source of moral principles which might influence secular legislation, but were not meant to be directly applied in Christian societies.
And Christianity always drew a distinction between ecclesiastical law, which governed the internal affairs of the Church (canon law), and temporal law (criminal and civil) which governed society at large. Temporal law was derived from secular, pre-Christian sources (especially the laws of the Roman Empire, but also the legal traditions of the Germanic tribes which invaded it); Christianity influenced aspects of it but the bulk of it was non-Christian in origin. Canon law did sometimes intrude into issues most nowadays would consider secular (such as marriage and inheritance), but the bulk of everyday legal matters were governed by the law of the State, not the law of the Church – the two were kept distinct (with separate court systems, legal professions and legal education), even if much more intertwined than most people nowadays would feel comfortable with.
It was only in the 20th century that a small group of American Protestants (R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North) began to spread the contrary idea, theonomy, that the criminal laws of the Torah are meant to be applied by Christians in the present day, as opposed to merely serving as a source of moral principle. But this is a very novel idea in Christian history, and it remains one which the vast majority of Protestants (even conservative Protestants) formally reject, to say nothing of the resolute Catholic and Orthodox opposition to it.
Islam is very different in that, unlike Christianity, it always proposed its religious laws (Sharia) as something to be adopted by the State. The whole Church-vs-State distinction which is fundamental to most Christians never existed to anywhere near the same degree in Islam, prior to the modern period. In mediaeval Muslim-ruled states, all judges were religious officials primarily implementing religious law – with decrees of the secular ruler at best serving as a supplement to it – quite unlike the situation which prevailed in Christian-ruled states, where Church and State had two parallel court systems applying two separate legal systems. The closest the Muslim world came to that, was granting religious minorities (primarily Jews and Christians) the right to legal autonomy, to impose their own laws and courts on their own communities (primarily in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance) – but as the law of the state, Sharia applied to everybody.
And among Jews, the vast majority believe that the Torah laws (with a few exceptions) were only meant to apply to Jews; and shouldn't be the law of the State of Israel prior to the coming of the Messiah. There is a minority who disagree (Kahanists, Hardal, some hardline Religious Zionists), and believe the modern State of Israel should implement Torah law today, but >95% of Jews worldwide disagree with them. Even the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews disagree with them.
So I really think drawing this kind of parallel between Islamic Sharia and Christianity or Judaism displays either a lack of understanding of all three religions, or else an excessive focus on very fringe minority positions. Although I also recognise that a lot of people drawing the parallel are actually complaining about attempts by conservative Christians (and to a lesser degree Jews) to legislate their own moral views on controversial social issues – but that isn't really akin to Islamic Sharia (except for the very fringe Christian reconstructionist/theonomist/Kahanist/etc minorities), since they are trying to amend secular law based on religion-influenced morality, quite unlike the Sharia approach of directly applying religious law to essentially secular issues such as murder cases or business contracts.
And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
The result is very different. If Sharia were fully implemented in your country, you’d go to the local courthouse and the judge would be a religious scholar applying the religious law of the Islamic state religion. Whereas, if conservative Christians vote for laws which encode their moral views (on abortion or whatever), those laws remain formally secular, and the judge enforcing them is not a religious official. Sharia expressly discriminates in favour of Muslims (e.g. it says the word of a Muslim witness is worth more than that of a non-Muslim witness in court); the laws you are complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar.
> And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
How? Trump is not a theonomist. Nor is Vance. Nor is Musk. I don’t believe any of the Cabinet secretaries are theonomists. Nor are any of the Supreme Court justices. The only way anyone can conclude that theonomy has any contemporary influence in the US government is by misrepresenting non-theonomist views as theonomy.
Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about religion, but who do you think put him in office? Who does he pander to?
I don't know who you are calling "fundamentalists" – I personally think the term should be restricted to the historical fundamentalist movement in American Protestantism, and those Protestants who view themselves as heirs of that movement today – but I think the vast majority of people you are labelling that aren't theonomists, and have zero interest in emulating Islamic Sharia by replacing secular courts with tribunals of Christian clergy, or modifying evidence laws to make the word of a Christian worth more than that of a non-Christian. Nobody is asking for anything remotely resembling that, except for a very tiny movement on the fringes of Reformed Protestantism – which the vast majority of Reformed (even conservative Reformed) reject, and I've never heard of a Catholic or Anglican or Methodist or Lutheran or Eastern Orthodox or whatever supporting it.
From a Catholic perspective, replacing secular law with "Christian Sharia" is clearly a heresy – never officially condemned because no Catholic of significance has ever proposed it – but if it ever did become a serious issue I'm sure the Church would waste no time in doing so, since it is just so blatantly contrary to the Catholic tradition. And the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the vast majority of Protestant churches (even otherwise very conservative ones), would say more or less the same thing – the details of their reasons would likely differ, but the conclusion wouldn't.
Again, I don't see the practical difference between religious tribunals run by clergy, and nominally secular courts run by nominally secular judges who make religiously-guided decisions based on religiously-guided laws.
We already have such laws, ranging from blue laws to laws about medical research and procedures. And this is under a much more secular system than the dominionists would like.
Multiple states still prohibit atheists from holding office. Of course, the bans are unenforceable... for now. Such restrictions were enforced before and they could be again with the right people on the Supreme Court. From there, it's a short trip to deciding that only adherents to a proper form of Christianity count. The existing requirements already exclude non-monotheists.
No wonder he never cared when muslims murdered Christians in Nigeria this year. Just 50 in Easter.
Which _other_ churches besides the Catholic Church? Well, Catholicism is more encompassing than many people are aware of.
For instance, you might have heard of the "Roman Catholic Church." Besides the Roman Catholic Church, aka the Latin Church (which primarily uses the Roman Rite), there are 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, each with their own liturgical traditions, theological emphases, and cultural heritage. All of them are in full communion with the Pope.
Note: While many Catholic parishes do offer live-streamed services, for the benefit of the sick and homebound, they do not fulfill the Sunday obligation to attend Mass if you are able to do so in person.
Popping into the church connected to your nearest Catholic university is a good bet, but you can probably find a Jesuit priest nearby even if you aren't in the Americas.
Martyrs were mauled by lions regardless of their work in spreading the word of God. Jesus himself died just like the common thieves next to him. The Catholic Church is built by people, and people sometimes die.
And for political side - in Poland, he was seen as way too leftist/liberal for the conservatives in Church, and too pro-Russian for the liberals in it - he had not condemned Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I found this surprising and genuinely thought-provoking.
Then, from religious point of view - they didn't really like his ecumenism approach, to them it was borderline of heresy.
Same thing will apply here.
Francis was not sexually liberal. He was marxist. He believed in liberation theology.
As someone who knew personally the man from a spiritual exercises' house in Spain(obviously when he was not yet Pope), I never liked the guy.
He was the friend of dictators. Loved so much Raul Castro, and Maduro, never criticised them, but criticised the affluence of western democracies. His business was the poor and he loved poor makers.
His support for Putin and not denouncing the takeover of absolute power was jarring for someone in his position.
You can be a leftist religious leader, but you have to report abuses when you see them, specially if the abuses are made by your friends. Of course you will lose them if you do.
Francis was too weak in character to oppose them. But as a Pope, that is your job.
Immigrants must be welcome as a moral imperative, but not in the Vatican!
Bigotry is wrong, except for the modern Marxist form!
Embrace the Progressive world view, but don’t talk about how we forcibly sterilized people!
Etc.
It isn't a purely US vs Europe thing though – you will find some Americans who call themselves "classical liberals", by which they mean "liberal" in largely the same sense as many Europeans do. It is just that "classical liberal" is somewhat of an obscure term in the US–you are only likely to know it if you are interested in or have studied economics, politics, etc–but among those Americans who know it there are definitely some who identify with it.
"Progressive" avoids this to some extent, in being a term which is closer to meaning the same thing in the US and Europe – although in a US context, "progressive" often means something in the same direction as "liberal" but going further.
Some people like to talk about two dimensions, social vs economic – so a person can be socially conservative but economically progressive (not an uncommon position among some conservative Catholics, for example) – although that still has the limitation that "socially progressive/conservative" is a selection of issues with an assumption that people's positions across them are correlated, but there are people who break the assumption, e.g. self-described "consistent pro-lifers" who oppose both legal abortion and the death penalty (unlike many "pro-lifers" in the US who oppose legal abortion yet are pro-death penalty), or certain radical feminists who support LGB rights but oppose transgender rights ("gender critical" as they prefer to call themselves, with "TERF" being the pejorative label applied to them by their opponents)
Some of these linkages are country specific – e.g. in the US, most social conservatives support the death penalty and oppose gun control, in some other Western countries you may find most social conservatives opposing the death penalty and supporting gun control, even while they agree with US social conservatives on other issues.
[1] https://www.wn.catholic.org.nz/adw_welcom/pope-says-kirill-m...
Disease is not a fistfight.
I wonder if a Pope's funeral can serve as an occasion for backdoor diplomacy - the world needs a lot of that.
If the next Pope is young and energetic, he may want to use his first few days making a mark in history by putting people from different side of different conflicts.
Paraxodically, he may have more chance putting the Israelis and Palestinian around a table (or at least provide the optics for a deal that would be discussed in the usual boring transactional way.)
On the other hand, one has to wonder what a populist pope would do (interfere in elections ? Make a u turn on climate, migrants, etc... ? Go back to hardcore conservatism ? Or fall into irrelevance ?)
Francis was the favorite pope of the Poor and of the Atheists.
The conventional wisdom is that Benedict was a hardline, conservative nut who had to resign for unknown reasons and was replaced by this well-loved, progressive guy. As seen in this thread, lots of people liked him and his philosophy, and his progressive take on things which always made the news, as he focused on the poor and traveled the world.
However, I've heard the conspiracy that Benedict was forced out, possibly related to his investigations into the child sex abuse scandal, maybe because he was finding important people involved. He was always very focused on the Church itself. And Francis was chosen, almost as a patsy, to end those investigations and instead be the friendly Pope out away from the Vatican.
I just always thought Benedict's resignation was surprising and there was something more to the story.
As for whether there was something more than the conventional wisdom to the story... I'm not really sure the news of his successors death is the correct thread to spawn that conversation in as it's getting to have little to do with Francis.
I'm a practicing but not terribly devout Catholic, and my impression of Benedict was that he was very formal and focused Pope on the Church itself (eg how we had to relearn all the prayers and responses in the Mass). Francis was much more about helping the poor of the world, and to my limited experience didn't affect Catholicism, with a Capital C, very much. His politics aligned with mine, so I didn't mind that so much, but I can't help thinking that all was very intentional, and that there be dragons lurking within the Vatican institution that are being ignored.
Jokes aside, he seemed like a genuinely decent human being and enough of a humanist to cast aside some of the drier absurdities surrounding the bureaucracy of Catholic Church administration, and ideology.
Even as someone who's deep in the skeptically agnostic camp on any questions about supreme creators (after all even a firm atheist can't be absolutely sure there is no genuine God) I had more respect for the apparent practical concern for humanity of this pope, particularly compared to the more typical nature of historical pontiffs.
Why so? There is no reason for one to exist so not having one is the obvious case.
We could of course assume anything, that we are av stylization, that the world is a large ice cream, that what we see is not the reality, whatever
If we go for that, sure, we cannot be sure of anything. But we then must also believe that we may live in a large ice cream.
It's a usable supposition, sure, and I agree that being asked to prove a negative is silly, but you can't actually be sure that one doesn't exist. It's not the obvious case at all, it's not even all that obvious as a supposition.
What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
We could also of course be living in a large ice cream, you can't be absolutely sure that's not the case either.
Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
Why, they are the same to me. None is more probable because none needs to be.
We can explain some things (until we cannot, and then we look for another model). Some we cannot explain because we do not yet have the appropriate knowledge. Someday we will, or we won't.
The difference between me and someone who believes in one or more deities I that I can say "we don't know because we are not good enough yet". They need to say "this is driven by god" (for reasons I cannot explain)
We would come from nothing in the same way God came from nothing. There's little reason to conclude the universe was ever non-existent.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
I actually thought you were going to say the first clause is less probable than whatever the second upcoming clause would be, because it sounds so improbably specific and human-crafted.
I think the belief that we were gifted our cognitive superiority (if that even is something unique to us in the history of the universe) by a divine entity is not meant to be an explanation of where our cognition comes from, but a method of assuaging our guilt. Because if God gave us the tools to debase, kill, maim, and roast ourselves on this rock, then surely it is meant to be, and will add up to something meaningful.
In fact, it's much more likely giving monkeys the ability to talk was an act of The Devil, not God.
That would only be true, if your God is part of the same universe, which by (christian) definition wouldn't be truly God. When you talk about God as the creator of the universe he has also created time and thus causality and other properties of the universe, like that things come from other things.
It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
> I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
Ascribing rationality to faith is an interesting supposition. It's all based on emotions, such as fear of death, on the side of the believers and greed on the side of belief-providers.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
No, it just seems more comforting to you. That doesn't make it any more plausible.
It makes sense to believe in Newton's laws, which he made up, even though we know the study of kinematics flowing from them is wrong. We have observed them being wrong. Someone else made up a complicated explanation of why and when Newton's laws are wrong. That guy's theories formed the basis for some incredible stuff that works really well, and he's probably wrong too... but I'll believe them both.
For anyone curious, this is an example of the Continuum Fallacy [1]. Interestingly, that wiki page happens to use Newton's laws as an example:
"For example, Newton's gravitational theories are "wrong" (they're a rough approximation) and Einstein's gravitation is almost certainly "wrong" too (it doesn't easily blend with quantum mechanics), but it would be a spectacular fallacy to suggest that they are equally wrong because there is such a continuous shading between "makes rough predictions" and "makes more accurate predictions" when it comes to scientific theories. Saying that the Earth is flat is wrong, and saying that it's spherical is also wrong — it's an oblate spheroid, roughly — but both statements do not have the same degree of "wrongness" on a continuum."
Unless you are denying Newton's agency or participation, he made those laws up. That's how articulation of reality works.
When you make a strong binary conjecture, you invite counterproof. You object to the wording because you find it beneath the dignity of those laws to label it so; on that point, we agree.
Because it can't be proven either way. An atheist who claims to know for certainty that there is no god is expressing a religious, faith-based viewpoint. I guess that isn't necessarily at odds with being an atheist, but part of why I'm an atheist is that I try to avoid believing in things that aren't provable and don't fit existing evidence.
> If we go for that, sure, we cannot be sure of anything.
We can be sure of things that have been proven using the scientific method. Certainly we can't be 100% sure, because that method is applied by fallible humans. But it's silly to suggest that levels of sureness don't matter; I can be more sure about the idea that we don't live in a giant ice cream than of other things, and that's fine.
But I think it's true that we can't really be sure of anything... and that's also fine.
When I think about it being the Pope is quite a position, probably the most unique in our world?
You have to be:
- A head of state, meaning taking positions though UN votes, etc.
- A "CEO", there is a lot of "business" decision to be taken to run the Vatican and the Church. I mean the Vatican can be seen as a giant museum (no offense) with a lot of people flowing in everyday so that need to be managed.
- But first he is a religious, spiritual leader and has to steer its evolution.
- Many also still see him steering an entire civilisation. Whether you are a Catholic or not, he is at the center of something.
Tough job...
In the end, nobody was really happy with him. On the other hand, he definitely had a will and a spine to stick to his own opinions - I guess that counts for something.
People pleasing in politics means never pushing out of the public's comfort zone.
(And no, this isn't an endorsement of any current orange head of state, far from it.)
Besides, Ukraine did turn other cheek after 2014 war, they just run out of cheeks to turn.
Back to main subject, I believe nothing weakened Pope Francis’s policies as much as his widely misunderstood position on this subject.
You know, what happened on Easter right?
Jesus' death was special, because he was without sins, he was the son of God (YMMV) and, because was walking around afterwards physically (i.e. capable of touching and eating, etc.) on earth. I am not sure, why you name it suicide, because he didn't killed himself, he got himself killed.
I do not think, that Jesus would defend "the agressor". But fighting in return is also not good, which is where "turning the other cheek" comes into play.
> reframe Christianity
How is it reframing, when it is what it is all about? Can you elaborate about the counter arguments?
Of course dying is not the only method of worshiping God and promote the faith, but it is quite effective. And giving the other option is killing people it is definitely the preferred way.
Link for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_the_other_cheek
Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
This is true if you live in a bubble. Most Catholics don't hold strong opinions on the Pope. The people who do are, as usual, the extremes on either side - not the majority.
There were vicious attacks to Pope Francis on the newspapers by the most orthodox professors there.
It's in keeping with the convention that stories that have "significant new information" are on topic for HN, and that includes major mainstream news stories when they first break.
- The pope was not only a very important religious and political leader but also wrote and spoke about the relationship between humans and technology [1, 2]
- I joined Hacker News due to its links but stayed for the community of smart and thoughtful people (and the great moderation). Oftentimes, a HN submission acts as a seed crystal for "off-topic" discussions that people want to talk about. As the people that make up this community get older, and as the times change, the topics we discuss change, too. At some level, technology always has political, moral, ideological implications. For me, HN is one of the best places to discuss these.
[1] https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pu...
[2] Tim Cook on how Pope Francis influenced his thinking: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1541230109287507
This isn't a headline service or newswire. It's a place for discussion too. He was the head of a large institution that has a lot of influence. And the views of the institution on emergent technologies is very much relevant. Those views are greatly shaped by the one at the top for their stint. This post isn't about religion.
I understand the intention behind keeping the thread respectful, especially in the context of someone’s death. That said, I find it difficult to fully separate reflections on Pope Francis from reflections on the institution he led. The papacy is not just a personal role—it is deeply representative of the Catholic Church as an institution, with all the historical and present-day weight that carries.
It also stands out to me that similar moderation reminders don't usually appear in threads about other public figures. That gives the impression that this topic is being treated as more sensitive or "untouchable" than others, and I think it's fair to question why that is.
I'm all for thoughtful conversation, but part of that includes being able to engage critically with the institutions and roles that public figures embody—even in moments like this.
Friend, this is not true. "dang" himself has often exhorted posters in this same manner and language when a notable death may attract inconsiderate commentary.
See the search link provided by tomhow in this branch of the same discussion:
It's fine to talk about the larger institution he led; please just keep to the HN guidelines, which apply equally to all threads on HN, and which, in particular, ask us to be thoughtful and substantive, and to avoid generic tangents.
(I've edited my top comment, to clarify what I think should be deemed on/off topic.)
Edit parent meant Ukraine war, not the Israel conflict quote Pope had.
I do not have much hope that Palestinians would behave “better” according to any sensible measure of the word.
I would conjecture that many governments would position themselves differently and that criticism would face less obstacles.
In the end it would be as much of a catastrophe.
It also dilutes the current and very real responsibilities of the 'effectors'. In saying 'they would have done the same' it becomes very easy to justify the unjustifiable.
No matter who did it, it would still be 'evil'. There would be 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Specially when the labels would be applied to dead children and innocents under rubble. Everyone keeps forgetting them.
Just because you think they would do the same to you, does not justify your actions.
> [basically] What if in a different world Hamas had all the weapons plus the backing of the US while Israel only had shoddy weapons?
In a hypothetical world where Usain Bolt was raised on Greenland and became interested in competitive gaming: would he have become the fastest human? Probably not. Different timelines.
This Sam Harris exercise is meaningless. The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible. Hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality are also fruitless. The goal is to figure out what evil actions are being committed and stop them.
But the abuser only did those things because he was abused as a child for eight yea— What’s that got to do with the problem at hand?
The goal of thought experiment wasn't to measure evil or good. It's to determine if the lines between good and evil are that far apart.
If Ukraine was way stronger than Russia, would it try to annex Kursk and other non-Ukraine regions? Would it commit as many atrocities? No. It would be constrained by its desire to join EU. Could it do it if it had 30 more people, more nationalistic populace, and near infinite ammo supply? Probably.
But a litmus test, just tells you rough acidity, not exact pH either.
The big issue was world powers of WW2 deciding to just bequeath land to Israel.
The Israel ethnostate predates Hamas.
You even call it an ethnostate.
> Edit: I mean Ukraine war.
Yes but it's not clear yet who will win, and the church cannot afford siding with the losing side, especially that now it's weakest it's been since medieval times.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.